Latin American Labor Reforms: Evaluating Risk and Security

MARIA VICTORIA MURILLO; LUCAS RONCONI; ANDREW SCHRANK

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Economics

Oxford University Press

Año: 2011; p. 790 - 812

This chapter addresses procedural and substantive changes to Latin American employment law in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It covers eighteen Latin American market economies between 1985 and 2009 and pays particularly careful attention to reforms undertaken in the 2000s in light of their variegated ?and somewhat anomalous? predecessors. While Latin American policymakers responded to the debt crisis by liberalizing their trade regimes, credit markets, and capital accounts in the 1980s and 1990s, they were reluctant to deregulate their labor markets. The defense of the traditional model simultaneously constitutes a rational response to the state?s inability or unwillingness to provide effective unemployment insurance, and underscores the validity of Mares?s account of the politics of social insurance in the context of state weakness. But Latin American informality provides a further obstacle to the emergence of broad-based risk pooling. And the growth of non-contributory cash transfer programs that are designed to deal with unemployment and poverty are likely to further complicate the politics of social provision in the future, especially if their beneficiaries organize to defend their survival rather than to defend or reinforce regulations that address formal employment.